In Solidarity. Kim Moody

in the value of labor power. It is not in the realm of theory that the productivity-wage link was broken, of course, but in that of class struggle—an altogether too “one-sided class war.” The combination of capital’s industrial and neoliberal strategies and practices on the favorable terrain of global restructuring and labor’s weak reaction and largely misplaced strategic choices and practices have broken the link. The “secret” of the 1982 recovery and whatever subsequent expansion follows the Great Recession is found largely in this broken link.

      The evidence for this lies not only in the trends in the United States discussed in this chapter, but on a world scale. Labor’s share of income fell not only in the United States but also in the seventeen leading Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, where it dropped from 75 percent in the mid-1970s to 66 percent by 2005.99 Nor was this redistribution of surplus value limited to the developed economies. The International Labour Office (ILO), in its 2008–09 Global Wage Report, argues that real wages have fallen as a share of world GDP at least since 1995 in pretty much the same way as in the United States. Waged labor, they point out, now makes up half the world’s economically active population. That is, this half is now employed for the most part by capital even if many of these jobs are contingent. The world economy, they calculate, grew by 3.3 percent from 1995 to 2007, while wages grew by only 1.9 percent. As a result, labor’s share of income fell, “an indication that increases in productivity have failed to translate fully into higher wages.”100 Capital has succeeded in restraining wages while simultaneously extracting productivity increases on a world scale, thus lowering the value of labor power across the planet. Much of this was made possible by the opening of vast new low-wage areas of the world to investment after 1990.

      With a geographic expansion on the scale of the 1990s no longer possible and the incentive for major technological breakthroughs blunted by declining relative labor costs, it is reasonable to assume that capital will continue to be wedded to this strategy for profitability at least until its limits are reached in the physical degradation or rebellion of the working class. Thus, for the foreseeable future, “the conditions which are most favorable to the workers” will not emerge on their own or as a result of the behavior of capital.

      The second conclusion has to do with the organized working class itself. Obviously, the strategies of retreat that have characterized the decisions and practices of most US union leaders since the late 1970s have failed. Chief among these were labor-management cooperation or “partnership,” the near-abandonment of the strike as a weapon, the mergers so common in the 1990s, and bureaucratic reorganization along the lines of the SEIU. Even the new organizing tactics based on employer “neutrality” have proved inadequate in a period when most employers who do not already have a union presence are disinclined to remain “neutral.”101 Simple changes in the leadership and even the structures of US unions, as badly needed as they are, won’t be enough if working-class organization is to spread and dig roots in a changed industrial terrain. The workplace, the central battleground over productivity, will be the key to sustained resistance and mobilization. At the same time, more attention needs to be given to the sort of political and social upheaval that has recently spread around the world, from Bolivia to Mexico to America’s immigrant communities, to North Africa and the Middle East, and to Wisconsin—mass, continuous street mobilizations, necessarily involving work stoppages.102

      Here it is good to bear in mind the decisions and strategies employed by capital discussed in this chapter. Ultimately, the division of surplus value is not simply a matter of mathematics, technology, or inevitability, but of power. Capital mobilized not only itself but its states and global institutions to bring about the shift in wealth we have seen in the era of neoliberalism. The value composition of capital presents limits, but not absolute limits. Pushing back the borders of profit is, in the final analysis, a matter of organization, politics, and force. Ironically, perhaps the only way capitalism might be forced to “kick the habit” of dependency on wage compression and work intensification is to force capital to shift some of its surplus to labor, perhaps encouraging increased investment in new “labor-saving” technology. The other possibility, of course, is that increased struggle on a mass scale eventually runs up against the limits of capital, in which case far more is involved than the behavior of unions, as we can see in Greece and elsewhere.

      Even the growth of unions, however, seldom comes about incrementally. Rather, as Kelly, Clawson, and others argue, union growth is a function of an upsurge in class conflict.103 The precise mechanisms required to create the human agency that makes such an upsurge possible is a matter of considerable debate, but two things seem clear. One is that changes in the way capital organizes labor and the conditions that workers must face have a great deal to do with it, as they did in the 1930s and in the 1960s. This is why the workplace or the “job” is key. The other is that such upheavals transform the very human agents who carry it out, expanding the realm of possibility.

      While there is no automatic mechanism that creates such an upturn in worker self-activity, the worker-led resistance that has commenced on a fairly large scale in Europe, Latin America, and more recently in China suggests the possibility of a new upsurge. Even such seemingly disconnected events as the plant occupation at Republic Windows and Doors in December 2008 and the spectacular mass movement in Wisconsin in early 2011 may be signs of things to come.104 It is also worth noting that where the strike has been revived, as in hotels and hospitals, among other settings, it has often worked. The choices made by union leaders and many workplace leaders in the 1980s opened certain possibilities for capital. The question now is: can workers in and out of today’s unions make different choices and bring about different outcomes? Whether America’s weakened labor movement can rise to the occasion, as it did in the early 1930s, when it had hit low levels of organization comparable to those of today, is as much a matter of practice and politics as of economics.

      Originally published as “Contextualising Organised Labour in Expansion and Crisis: The Case of the US” in Historical Materialism 20(1): 3–30, 2012.